Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Aged Care and Senior Australians (Senator Colbeck) to questions without notice asked by Opposition senators today relating to aged care.

Early in the pandemic, Senator Colbeck announced a scheme that was supposed to deliver 36,000 food boxes to older Australians who were unable to shop safely because of COVID. Just 38 of those 36,000 boxes were ultimately delivered, and, when asked about it in this chamber, Senator Colbeck perversely insisted that he regarded this as a success. That should have been a bit of an early warning sign about this minister's approach to his job, because that scheme was a failure, and that failure was predictable. The CEO of the Council on the Ageing explained that he was not surprised that this occurred, because the program didn't match what older Australians needed or wanted.

Early on, we saw the qualities that have allowed Minister Colbeck to oversee a shocking tragedy in Australia's aged-care homes: his refusal to listen to stakeholders and older Australians; his unwillingness to take responsibility for his failures; his determination to deny facts, to call a fork a spoon, in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence; and, of course, his rank incompetence. You can draw a line from the tragedy that is currently consuming our aged-care system to the neglect that the government have shown this sector over their three terms in office.

They have failed to respond to the recommendations from the many inquiries before them, and the commissioners presiding over the royal commission said:

Had the Australian Government acted upon previous reviews of aged care, the persistent problems in aged care would have been known much earlier and the suffering of many people could have been avoided.

It puts it in perspective, doesn't it, when this government insists that the matters that have unfolded in Victoria were unforeseeable. That's not what experts are telling them and it's not what the royal commission is telling them. Senator Keneally asked, earlier in the week and today, how many older Australians have died from neglect. What was the answer today? 'How would we define this?' There are plenty of sources of evidence which could be used to define this. The minister could go, for example, to the reports that have piled up on his desk—quarter after quarter after quarter—which have found that between October and December last year standards were not met in 45 per cent of site audits and 100 per cent of the review audits. There are the reports which landed on his desk which said that between January and March this year standards were not met in 41 per cent of site audits and 87.5 per cent of review audits.

What was the minister's response to these facts? On the basis of his evidence to this chamber today, on the basis of his answers—absolutely nothing. The minister could not point to a single thing he had done or a single action he had taken. But he did revert to type: he did the thing he has done on every occasion when he's been called to account for his failures, and that is to blame somebody else. Today he blamed the regulator. In his answers to question after question after question, there was always somebody to blame. If it wasn't the aged-care quality and safety regulator it was the Victorian state government. Or it was the New South Wales state government, because he didn't like their scathing critique of his mishandling. Or it was the aged-care facilities themselves, or it was the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee—there's always somebody, somebody other than this minister, this minister who cannot point in any concrete way to a thing he has done. This is a minister who can't remember the occasions on which he has engaged the national cabinet or the Commonwealth cabinet on these questions.

The consequence of this unwillingness to accept his responsibility for managing this system and this crisis has been a complete unwillingness to learn from mistakes and to listen to experts. Experts knew that aged-care facilities would struggle to find staff during a coronavirus outbreak, but nothing was done. We knew this from Newmarch House in my home state of New South Wales, but the government and this minister knew nothing, did nothing and did not have a plan to prevent this from happening in Victoria.

The great shame of all this is that one of the most incompetent ministers in this government has been left in place by this uncaring Prime Minister to preside over a sector full of vulnerable people who deserved our collective protection. It is a disgrace. (Time expired)